NYT on snub: 'We'll get our turn'

Editors from the New York Times and the Washington Post say they’re not offended that President Barack Obama skipped over their papers and other traditional major dailies during Tuesday night’s primetime press conference.

“Doesn't bother me,” the Times’ Washington bureau chief, Dean Baquet, said in an email to POLITICO. “I'm glad to see so many people at the press conference, at a time when so many news organizations are cutting their bureaus. Glad to see people who never get called on asking questions.”

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Added Washington Post Political Editor Tim Curran: "The president is certainly entitled to call on whomever he chooses, and we take no offense if he does not call on us on any given day."

But at a time of economic calamity for the newspaper business, not everyone is so blasé.

Haynes Johnson – the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter who’s now a professor at the University of Maryland – said it was “extraordinary and telling” that “for the first time in the history of the presidential press conference, an American president declined to call on any representatives of the major U.S. newspapers.”

Johnson said the snub “signals a deliberate effort by the Obama White House to denigrate the major newspapers.”

“Politically, I believe this decision will not help the president,” Johnson said. “He has had, until recently, the most positive press of any president in our times, or maybe ever. Clearly, with the economic crisis spreading, that favorable tone has been much less so of late. While the news business, especially newspapers, are in perilous economic condition, and yes, this seems like a heavy-handed blow adding insult to injury, the president needs all the support he can get now. Last night's action won't help him with the newspapers, and this strikes me as both baffling and needless from Obama's standpoint.”

Charlotte Hall, president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors President, also admitted to being disappointed that the president bypassed the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal in favor of questions from the TV networks, Univision, Stars and Stripes, the Washington Times and POLITICO.

“Newspapers do the majority of watchdog and investigative reporting in the country. Newspapers also ask tough questions at news conferences,” said Hall, the editor of the Orlando Sentinel.

“With their burgeoning online audiences, their reporting has reach and impact. So I was disappointed the president did not call on any reporters from the major papers. I hope he will be responsive to their questions in the future, not because that might help ‘save’ newspapers, but because they produce the strongest and most in-depth reporting on national affairs.”

Tuesday night’s press conference was Obama’s second primetime briefing as president. At the first, he took a question each from the New York Times and the Washington Post – but also from the Huffington Post .

Tom Rosenstiel, director for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says it’s “too soon to tell” if the snub of the big papers this time says anything about how the White House views them or the role they play in the changing media market.

“I don’t know if this implies anything about the decline of American newspapers,” Rosenstiel says. “I think we need to watch and see if there is a larger pattern here.”

Baquet agreed.

“We'll get our turn,” he said. “We've had an interview with him. Not everything we learn about government comes from press conferences.”